VIETNAM'S JOURNALISTS NOW READER-FRIENDLY Series: Return to Vietnam Sidebar Story

VIETNAM'S JOURNALISTS NOW READER-FRIENDLY Series: Return to Vietnam Sidebar Story

Article excerpt

The editor of the Saigon Times, this city's English-language
weekly news magazine, is learning the ways of free-market
journalism as his country rushes into capitalism.

"A few years ago, all newspapers and magazines in the country
were subsidized," the editor, Tran Ngoc Chau, told a visiting
American reporter. "It didn't matter how many copies they sold.
Now, circulation is very important, and we have had to change the
way we work."

In the country's new sink-or-swim economy, in which most
newspapers must pay their own way through circulation and
advertising, Chau and his colleagues have adopted the first rule of
Western journalism: "The Vietnam press now considers the reader the
king."

"So we have changed our methods," he said. "We choose carefully
what to publish - what the reader needs, not what the government
wants."

He added that sometimes what the reader needs is the same as
what the government wants, but sometimes it's not.

Chau, a 45-year-old former Saigon schoolteacher, became a
journalist when the communists won the war in 1975 and unified the
country. Working for a young people's newspaper, he saw a change in
the role of the press even before the government announced the
start of its free-market policy of doi moi, or renovation, in 1986.

"We published articles criticizing education policy," he
recalled. "We criticized a policy that discriminated between
students who were revolutionaries and those who had supported the
South Vietnamese government. As a result, the policy was changed,
and personal origins were no longer considered."

He said the newspaper became very popular, but he questioned
his visitor's observation that telling the truth about bad public
policies generally makes a newspaper popular.

"A newspaper must publish not only truth but also information,"
he said. "Sometimes it is difficult for readers to recognize the
truth when it is published, but they always must have information."